Plasticity of the self as inferred from the enfacement illusion: behavioral and electrophysiological studies

Being fundamental to higher forms of consciousness and in preserving identity over time, self-face recognition was considered as a robust process.Yet, experiencing tactile facial stimulation while seeing similar synchronous stimuli delivered to the face of another individual, induces 'enfacement', i.e. the subjective experience of ownership of the other’s face and a bias in attributing to the self facial features of the other. In a series of recent studies, we showed that enfacement may induce behavioral and neural plastic changes in how self-face is processed and that the tendency to include the other into self-face representation is highly dependent upon positive interpersonal perception of the synchronously stimulated other. We linked this effect to a sort of strategy for “ defending the self”, i.e., we only include likable features in the representation of our self to maintain and protect positive self-views . Thus, by suggesting that features of others’ identity can be included in the notion of the self, our results may pave the way to novel paradigms for exploring deficits of self-representation.